I talk a lot about scene structure with my students and I often talk a lot about Dwight Swain, who was a writing teacher way back in the 1960s. So before a lot of us were born.
When I tell people about his ideas of scene and structure, a lot them haven’t heard about it before, which makes me gasp, but also re-realize that I live in a little writing bubble where I think everyone knows “all the things” all the time.
Story is basically a sequence of events, right? And to create a story you have to put that sequence of events together in a way that’s going to jive to the reader or for the reader.
To do that you need scenes, which make up that sequence of events.
WHAT IS A SCENE ACCORDING TO SWAIN?
A scene is the basic unit of a story, and there are two main types of scenes in the Swain way of thinking (note: this is not the ONLY way or even the RIGHT way of thinking about types of scenes). His are:
The scene
The sequel
Dwight Swain wrote a book called the Techniques of a Selling Story, and he basically defined a scene this way,
“A scene is a unit of conflict lived through by the character and reader.”
There are three big pieces there:
A conflict
Lived through
Character and reader
In a scene there needs to be conflict, immersion so your reader can relate to what’s happening to the character and LIVE THROUGH that character.
To have a conflict, you need to have a goal for your character so that something can obstruct it and your reader can worry.
It all makes sense, right?
Swain goes on to say that a scene must:
Be interesting
Move that story forward
He then writes that in order for a scene to make the story progress
“it changes your character’s situation; and while change doesn’t always constitute progress, progress always involves change.”
And in each scene you need to have:
Goal - what the character wants (to own something, to be free of something, revenge)
Conflict (something keeping your character from that goal)
Disaster (Swain calls this the “logical yet unanticipated development that throws your focal character for a loss.”
Cool, right?
LET’S TALK ABOUT SEQUELS
The sequel is what happens after that scene. It connects one scene to the next, Swain says. It’s a transition.
And its goals are to (in his words):
Translate the disaster into goal
Telescope reality
Control the tempo
It’s here that decisions are made. It’s here that the protagonist reorients themselves. It’s here where the protagonist has to find answers and possibilities and deal with what just happens and turn it into a new goal. And it often involves a bit of summary or exposition.
HOW THIS IMPACTS THE PACING OF YOUR BOOK
And these sequel/transitional places control the tempo of a story because they give the reader a tiny bit of a pause, slowing down the pacing. The longer the sequel, usually the slower the pace there. The more sequels that are longer than scenes? Usually the slower the book’s pace. The more, longer scenes compared to the sequel? Generally the pace is faster.
Wow, right?
It’s a cool way to think of it when you think of your book’s overall structure and pacing. Sure, it’s not as sexing as the Save the Cat structure, but there’s a good foundation going on there.